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Robolawyer to Handle Clickwraps?
adelord writes "Recently Wired published an essay by Mark D. Rasch describing the need for a 'browser-based automaton that could be adjusted to match your tolerance for legal mumbo jumbo' to help the user navigate the torrent of user agreements most of us click through without reading. Is this a job for Google Labs, and if not, who else would write the software for it? Do you think it is a good idea? While the legal exposure from writing software that partially fills the role of a lawyer could be enormous, I sure that it would have an ironclad user agreement that I would simply click through in my excitement to use it."
Lawyers drawing up contracts tend to go out of their way to make things as precise as possible. Lawyers hate leaving unintended loopholes, so they bend over backwards to try and make sure they don't happen. This is why there's usually so much redundance in legal filings.
However, in the process of making things as precise as possible, they often make things very difficult to understand, and ironically the stuff they put in to make things very precise may end up not being interpreted as intended, because it's so hard for a third party to understand.
Of course, when a contract stretches into a hundred pages of overly precise legalese, even the lawyer who wrote it might glaze over a little bit while re-reading it, and miss all of the unintentionally misleading or confusing pieces.
There is a movement in the legal profession these days to make things more readable, but try as they might, lawyers still usually get caught up in the overwhelming need for absolute precision, and things end up being unreadable by the average person.
There's also the fact that every time you try to dumb something down to more common language, you risk losing a lot of the nuance of the original language, and can often produce a document that is interpreted very differently than the original, even though the words might technically have the same meanings.